David Johns

The International Year of Biodiversity–From Talk to Action

Conservation almost always takes a backseat to human economic concerns even though the human economy relies on nature. The economic turmoil of the last year has reinforced this prejudice, yet the downturn in the economy offers some lessons for conservation professionals. For example, the political leaders who were supposed to provide oversight of economic institutions ignored repeated warnings about weaknesses in the financial system, and when the crisis came they acted shocked and surprised. Their response has been to pump hundreds of billions of dollars of public money into mismanaged businesses to keep the global economy from collapsing while genuine economic reform languishes. If leaders ignore warnings about the economy, their highest priority, then how can conservation professionals make their warnings heard about the dire consequences of losses of biological diversity? Linking biological diversity to economic concerns will not suddenly attract attention, and not all aspects of biological diversity have obvious economic value. Nor will leaders likely heed warnings about how continued degradation of the natural world will cause much greater human suffering than economic depression. Reminders that it took millions of years following past mass extinctions to recover high levels of biotic complexity and diversity, that a biological depression cannot be short-circuited like a depressed economy, and that humans cannot pump new species into the system like they can inject cash or credit into an economy are too distant or abstract. Also rather abstract for decision makers and contrary to their hubris is the argument that the complexity of biological systems dwarfs that of human economic systems and makes them much more difficult to repair and therefore worthy of protection. What might encourage political leaders to heed warnings about declines in biological diversity? More than a few voices are necessary. They must be many and pow-

Adapting Human Societies to Conservation

Earth is finite. The human footprint is growing rapidly. As our species commandeers more of the planet, extinction rates are climbing and ecosystems are unraveling. Growth of the human footprint inheres in the structure and dynamic of the dominant human societies of the last several thousand years, presenting conservationists with a daunting challenge. Societies are organized around a continuous conversion of the world’s ecosystems to human use. The decision makers we lobby, plead with, genuflect to, and curse are embedded in and owe their positions to these societal structures. But they do not simply respond to the constraints of these structures. As Machiavelli (1996[1531]) observed, a small number of people are always intent on achieving great wealth or power at the expense of the rest of us (and nature), and it is mostly they who occupy top decision-making positions. Few political or economic leaders, including those who care about nature, will consider solutions that might diminish their power. Hence, their ubiquitous deflection of demands to address conservation problems to debates about symptoms. If existing societal structures continue as they are, most conservation achievements may turn out to have been little more than temporary stays of execution. Some conservation professionals argue that the best our community can do is adapt our goals to the growing human footprint. To do so should be no more acceptable than accommodating racism. Other conservationists are confused because many decision makers, including the most powerful, admit that human well-being depends on nature. Indeed, hostility toward nature and the mentality of conquest have faded. So why hasn’t societal behavior changed? Why do societies continue to embrace the same societal dynamic that has led to ecological ruin in many parts of the globe? Editorial cartoonist Tom Toles captures this dynamic in a piece that shows a patch of land being divided in half again and again with the caption, “The Compromise Position on Habitat Conservation. We’ll only develop half of whatever is left.” What are conservation professionals to do? The eminent scientist Archie Carr (1964) declared that the future of wild things depends on human conscience, but conscience has not proved reliable. Extant human societies do not produce intense empathy (an essential element of conscience) with the natural world among sufficient numbers of people to spontaneously overcome societal inertia. To halt anthropogenic extinctions and reverse ecosystem decline, conservationists cannot avoid a strategy aimed at confronting and changing societal structures any more than did those who ended apartheid. Changing the structure of society is challenging, and to most conservation professionals, including those who work in the policy realm, it seems utopian or hopelessly grandiose. But just as no one in the biological sciences would assess a species’ prospects without reference to the ecological landscape, so conservation professionals should not dismiss the potential for structural change without assessing the political and economic landscape that governs much human behavior affecting conservation. A first step in altering societal inertia is determining what conservation-compatible societies look like. Most conservation professionals would say this determination is outside their expertise. Yet no other group has the requisite motivation to make the determination. Conservation scientists understand the trophic relationships that are fundamental in evaluating the relative effects of alternate societal structures on biological diversity. They need not and cannot craft a complete vision for naturecompatible societies; that is a task for societies as a whole to undertake. Serious objections can be raised against pursuing nature-compatible societal reform. First, efforts at largescale, fundamental social change often fail and have caused great misery. There is truth in this objection, but past efforts have invariably involved enlarging human power and control over nature and other humans. Dismantling power and control does not necessarily present the same problems. Second, grand vision often comes unhinged from its analytical moorings and becomes a faith; but this is not inevitable. Third, conservation

Rescuing Wolves: States Not Immune to Politics

J. T. Bruskotter et al. have performed a valuable service in showing how the public trust doctrine might protect species delisted from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) or otherwise not protected (“Rescuing wolves from politics: Wildlife as a public trust resource,” Policy Forum, 30 September